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With the removal of levels some of our schools have moved to using number bonds and times tables for baseline testing in order to track progress and achievement in numeracy skills. For times tables, children are tested on 20 randomised questions up to the 12x table. This has inevitably led to people asking what the FASTEST time for this test is.....

...as a precursor to this, we think its worth noting that many schools teach memorisation of individual questions first and then, in order to instill mastery, start to push on improving time. We want children to move to using implicit memory to recall times tables answer and this means constantly pushing their ability to do this. Time is the best way to achieve this and our experience suggests that children really KNOW their times tables when they can recall all 20 random questions in under 1 minutes. Most children (and adults) can push (with a little work) this time to 40-45s and this, we believe, is real mastery. However it usually takes considerably more practice (and effort) to hit the 30-40s range. Very few people appear able to hit below 30s. The fastest time, so far (as in the photo below!) is 24.6s. That is VERY fast, although that said there are a couple of points to bear in mind:

1. These are random questions, so a score like may be achieved with some single digit answers

2. We are aware that newer devices do run (slightly) faster which can feed the questions (slightly) faster

3. This was achieved on a tablet, using two finger number entry. This IS quicker on a tablet, but only slightly in comparison to one finger entry on a phone.